


bend and break.

by katarama



Series: leave this blue neighborhood. [16]
Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: Communication, Frame - Freeform, Healthy Relationship-Building, M/M, New Beginnings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-26
Updated: 2017-04-26
Packaged: 2018-10-24 04:45:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,920
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10734387
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/katarama/pseuds/katarama
Summary: It’s not too long until it’s been a decade since the draft, a year and a little bit off.  Throughout that time, Kent has consistently carved out a place for himself in Jack’s life, has demanded Jack’s attention.  He has kept coming back to Jack, seemingly certain of what he wanted.For the first time in eight and a half years, it’s Jack’s turn to actively make a choice about what he wants.





	bend and break.

**Author's Note:**

>   
>  **If you're new to this series, start[HERE](http://archiveofourown.org/works/10586022).**
> 
> Here's the last part! Thank you everyone for sticking with me, and for being so supportive and great <3

Jack has never been the best with words.  

He’s always been measured in casual conversation.  Afraid to say much unless he’s sure of himself.  He never wants to screw up, to say the wrong thing or to make people think he’s weird or to make people uncomfortable.  He’s good at press because he is good at not saying much.  His answers follow a formula, and he’s had a basic level of PR training that helps him know that he’s doing it right.

He’s gotten better with words, over time.  Time and practice.  He’s gotten better at verbalizing his feelings without feeling like a burden, at least to his therapist, if no one else.  He has friends who are invested in him, friends like Lardo and Shitty and Camilla and the rest of his Samwell team who he thinks are genuinely interested in what he has to say and what he thinks.  

Kent helped some, too.  If Jack is being totally honest.  Jack shared things with Kent he hadn’t told anyone before, because Kent felt like a safe person to tell.  Jack was still bottling things up, but he got used to having an outlet for the big things, every once in a while.  Kent reassured Jack that his feelings were important.  No one had ever told Jack that they weren’t before, but he had it in his head, and Kent vehemently tried to tear that down.

When Jack was in the Q, he genuinely believed that Kent was the best at words.  He thought Kent was so smooth and funny, thought Kent had the people thing figured out.  Jack thought Kent was warm and engaging and just irreverent enough, understanding and good at communicating hockey _and_ non-hockey stuff to the team without tripping over his tongue or sticking his foot in his mouth.

It probably wasn’t true even then.  Kent was probably way more awkward than Jack remembers him being, because Kent was a teenage dude.  Jack doesn’t know.  

He knows it’s definitely not true now.  Because they both admit that they should talk, that it’s time, that the conversation is long overdue.  And then they both fall silent.  Unsure.  Jack fidgets, running his stained-blue fingers along the design on the pocket of his jeans.  Kent’s eyes are drawn to the movement.  Jack stops.

There’s no easy way to start a conversation about the years of hurt they have built up.  They both want to talk, but neither of them wants to be the one to start these hard conversations.  Ones about grief and loss and pressure and abandonment and anxiety and betrayal of trust.  The positive feelings they once had are no less scary, no less remote and no less relevant.  They felt like too much to talk about back at the time, and Jack would have thought time would have dulled that, would have made them less important and easier to talk about, but it hasn’t.

They sit there, in a silence that is very nearly comfortable but that isn’t what they’re out there for.  

“Listen, do you just…” Kent pauses, then picks back up, his words strengthening, becoming more certain.  “Do you just wanna get the fuck out of here?  I kinda really wanna get the fuck out of here.  It’s only a matter of time before you’re fending off drunk tourists, and these places have never been your shit.”

“Where would we go?” Jack asks.

“Somewhere more private,” Kent says, his voice low, his mouth curling around the words.  Even in this context, the words still make a shiver go down Jack’s spine, still make the words stick in his head.  There’s something inherently intimate about being alone with Kent.  He feels it a little bit out here, in the night, the same way he did that first night waiting outside the D-man’s house.  There’s something about the way Kent’s gaze and focus settle on Jack that makes these moments feel full.

It’s disarming.  He’s 27 years old, and it still feels intense.  It’s only going to be more intense in an enclosed space, somewhere where they both have the liberty to speak freely, if they can muster up the words.  Somewhere where they are out from under the eyes of the stars and the lights and the crowds.

“You mean your place,” Jack says.  

“Unless you have strong feelings about it being yours,” Kent says.  “It’s a lot fishier to be heading to a hotel room together.  No one probably would notice, or care all that much.  We fill our stadium for games, but most people staying in a hotel in Vegas aren’t there for the hockey.  But there is less chance of being seen with me.  If you still care about that.”

“I think we both still care about that,” Jack says, “or you wouldn’t have brought it up in the first place.”

Kent looks for a second like he’s going to say something, like there are words at the tip of his tongue.  His expression isn’t severe, and his gaze isn’t heated.  Jack doesn’t think it’d be a rehashing of the same conversation they had again and again before the draft, because that conversation always used to always start with Kent upset and go downhill from there.

Kent swallows his words, anyway.

“You could meet Kit,” Kent offers, a kind of truce.  “She’ll probably hate you.  She doesn’t like strangers that much.  She’ll probably mostly give you space, but she’ll be watching you all night.  My fridge is stocked with shit your nutritionist won’t hate me for.  You can stay the night, I’ll get you back to the hotel in the morning before your flight.  I have a guest bedroom, or...”

“The guest bedroom works,” Jack says, because he has to put his foot down at some point.  He has to carve out some boundaries heading into this.  He’s been so concerned about things swinging bad, getting caught in a conversation that gets one of them too angry and leads to someone lashing out.  From personal experience, it’s a real possibility.

But it hasn’t occurred to him until now that it could also swing the other way.  That things could go in a direction that neither of them intended, that it could feel like everything being in Kent’s space.  In Kent’s bedroom, in Kent’s bed.  It’s a different bed in a different city in a different country.  It’s both of them more grown up, their bodies different from when they were 18 and Jack was barely growing facial hair in evenly.  But it wouldn’t make the warmth of Kent next to him any less real, any less overwhelming.  It’d still be Kent’s hair damp on the pillow and the smell of his body wash and the press of skin and bone when Kent turns over in his sleep, because Kent was a bed hog and a sleep cuddler when they were kids, and Jack doubts that has changed.

Jack doesn’t want to fight with Kent, but he also doesn’t want to end up there.  Not tonight.  Not this soon.  Not after such a long time with things being so broken.  Not after what will probably be a long and hard talk.  Hopefully, if this goes well, only the first talk among many.  If it goes well, maybe Jack might use Kent’s phone number again, one of these days.  For all the times messages went unanswered, for all the talking he did with Shitty about not being ready, he never deleted the number.

That might be getting a little bit ahead of himself.  Getting a little bit too hopeful about this conversation.

“So that’s a yes to mine?” Kent asks.

Jack takes a breath, takes a beat.  Assesses his feelings, makes sure he’s positive that he wants to do this.  That he’s ready for the consequences, whether they lead to him calling an Uber late at night or early in the morning to get himself out, or whether it’s curling Kent back into his life, little by little.  Taking it slow and being sure, this time, instead of barreling into feelings blindly and falling apart when the crash catches up.

“Yes,” Jack says.

It’s not too long until it’s been a decade since the draft, a year and a little bit off.  Throughout that time, Kent has consistently carved out a place for himself in Jack’s life, has demanded Jack’s attention.  He has kept coming back to Jack, seemingly certain of what he wanted.  He texted Jack.  A lot, at first, and then a lot again when Jack decided on Samwell.  He showed up in person, twice, put himself in Jack’s space in the most literal sense.  His voice and his face and his presence filled up Jack’s room in the Haus even after he had left.

For the first time in eight and a half years, it’s Jack’s turn to actively decide.  It’s Jack’s turn to make a choice about what he wants.  It’s Jack’s turn to decide whether this should be a one-off, him giving himself and Kent one night and making it a chance to move on for good, or whether this should be the start of something.  The start of him actively putting himself in Kent’s space, too.  The start of him accepting and affirming the space that Kent has wanted to fill in his life all this time, with adjustments.  With limitations.  With healthier terms.  With terms that better suit two adults that are edging dangerously close to 30.  With terms that better suit the two of them and their complicated history and their complicated issues.

Jack is nervous.  It feels like a big decision.  He tells himself that it isn’t one that he necessarily has to make tonight, or even tomorrow, or the day after that.  He tells himself that what he decides tonight isn’t binding, doesn’t decide the course of his future forever.  It’s a single night and a single conversation.  Even if it goes well, every conversation after that is going to be a single night and a single conversation.  There’s no obligation here.  It doesn’t have to mean anything.

But Jack thinks that now, maybe, hopefully, he can admit to wanting it to.  He can listen to Kenny say, “I miss you,” and not throw it back in his face, can admit that he missed Kent too.  He can admit to being hurt by Kent and to hurting Kent.  He can admit to still feeling things about Kent.  Strong things.  Uncertain things.  Things that are a lot more of a mixed bag now than back when they were 18-year-old kids who felt like they only had hockey and each other and were taking on the world.

Jack has a choice, and the awareness of that is thrumming under his skin when he tells Kent to call a cab.  When he sits down in the backseat of the car and lets his legs spread and Kent does the same, their knees brushing and neither of them moving away.  When he lets Kent pay the cab fare and follows Kent up to his place.

But after eight and a half years, that choice is one he’s finally ready to make.  Not permanently.  But at least for tonight.

* * *

When Jack gets on the plane back to Providence the next morning, it’s with bags under his eyes and a year’s worth of weight off his shoulders and a new contact request on his Skype account.

He already knows before he touches the ground that he’s going to accept it.

**Author's Note:**

> On tumblr [here](http://polyamorousparson.tumblr.com).


End file.
